YouTube Mobile For iOS, Android To Get Playback Feature

YouTube’s Pallavi Powale brings good news to fans of perhaps the world’s largest video streaming service. The software engineer said YouTube will now bring its playback options to its mobile platform.

Some YouTube users can already try accessing the feature in their devices. The hamburger shaped icon on top of the app allows access to a wide variety of “Playback” options.

This allows them to speed up the video, albeit allowing the audio to sound like chipmunks, or slow down the audio. The latter is extremely useful for tutorials, and other videos where slowing down can help pay attention to detail.

Powale also praised YouTube engineers at work in the YouTube announcement, as they had to make sure the playback options will work without sacrificing audio and video quality. This is quite the feat, as while similar troubles were found in the desktop YouTube website, smartphones have inherent limitations in network and hardware.

This might explain why video quality is affected when speeding up or slowing down videos. This is because video quality is only as good as the way the phone’s hardware allows it to be.